


no homestead here

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Episode 6.02, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 08:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16512815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Boyd meets Raylan at Calhoun Schreier's office. It ain't the place to talk about fatherhood, maybe, and it certainly ain't the place to ruminate on all the things that were and shall be.





	no homestead here

**Author's Note:**

> This was only sort of in response to someone's prompt about missing scenes in season six, but I saw this scene where Boyd asks, "Does it change you?" shortly after he and Ava talk about getting out of Harlan, and this is what came to mind. It won't make a lot of sense if you don't have the episode in mind while reading it, probably, though don't let that stop you! Title is from a poem, "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills," by Yvor Winters.

Calhoun Schreier ain’t there, but Raylan Givens is. Because where else would Raylan be, besides biding his time outside a realtor’s office until Boyd arrived?

If Boyd suspected Raylan of more than a passing acquaintance with technology, he’d accuse the man of tracking Boyd’s phone. However, Boyd knows better than to believe Raylan capable of doing more than operating the GPS on his phone. He also knows that Raylan’s uncanny ability to discover Boyd in the midst of a scheme originated when they were no more than three years old, when Raylan caught Boyd sneaking cookies off his mama’s cooling rack.

Of course, when they were three, Raylan had still wanted to be a bandit, and he had crept over—as quietly as a toddler could—and filled his hands with their ill-gotten gains. Their mamas had been watching them the whole time, of course. Boyd’s mama had even gotten out the camera, and somewhere in a Crowder attic there was a picture of two little boys with crumbled cookies in their hands and chocolate smeared across their faces, grinning at each other in delight at having evaded justice and gotten away with the crime.

Boyd wonders what Raylan’s daughter will be like. He wonders if Raylan will snap pictures of her from the kitchen doorway, burning the tips of her fingers on cookies still too hot to steal. He wonders who will share the moment with Raylan, the way Frances Givens and Clary Crowder had shared recipes and gossip, bruises and cigarettes over kitchen tables in the holler.

He bequeaths the ledger and deeds to Raylan, because Boyd has long believed that discretion is the better part of staying alive. He doesn’t think Raylan would shoot him for a briefcase—he harbors a deep suspicion over Raylan’s willingness to shoot him at all, despite the scar on Boyd’s chest that declares it to be otherwise—but there’s no reason to test the theory with Boyd’s life.

Raylan rests his hand on his gun and Raylan hides behind his badge and Boyd remembers a sixteen-year-old boy with sun-kissed, sandy hair running pell-mell down Main Street away from Mr. Jasmer’s corner store, stolen bubblegum falling out of his pockets and Jasmer chasing after him with a shotgun older than Boyd and Raylan combined.

Boyd means to walk away, but that boy stops him, cuts down an alley and ducks back around to the truck where Boyd’s waiting, empties his pockets into Boyd’s outstretched hands, laughing so hard he doubles over and nearly pukes on the street. “Did you see him?” that tan, lanky teenager wonders, breathing hard from the running and the laughter and the exhilaration of it all. “Did you see his face, Boyd? Did you?”

“Does it change you?” Boyd asks, without turning around. He closes his eyes for a moment, shoves his hands in his pockets and thinks of the way Raylan’s fingers had brushed his, back then, sweaty hands gladly turning all their pilfered loot over to Boyd. Then he turns back to look at Raylan now, forty-two years old and grey in his hair and lines on his face and the twist of his mouth that he wears around Boyd, the one that isn’t quite the smile it used to be.

“What’s that?” Raylan replies, his hat pulled low so Boyd can only catch the gleam in his eyes, but Boyd knows the planes and shadows of Raylan’s face in the light of a summer baseball game, in the pitch dark of a collapsing mine.

“Having a child,” he specifies, because Raylan has run farther and faster than anyone could catch him, faster than Boyd could watch him go. He has changed in myriad ways, from a three-year-old bandit to a sixteen-year-old dirty rotten no-account Givens boy to a forty-two-year-old marshal with the law a trigger at his fingertips. “They say it changes a man. You think that’s true?”

Raylan Givens looks the same way he did at nineteen, smiles like he’s got a secret that Boyd needs to pick at until it bleeds. He smiles like he’s three years old with his baby teeth sunk into one of Boyd’s mama’s cookies, like he just hit the first homerun of the season and doesn’t want to grin too wide, one hand shielding his eyes as he searches Boyd out in the stands.

“Guess we’ll see,” Raylan says, his eyes on Boyd. “Won’t we?” He keeps his hat low and his hand on his gun, his badge on his belt. He’s every inch a federal marshal, no hint of stolen chocolate on his cheek, no sign of the laughter that made Mr. Jasmer threaten to shoot them both the next time they came in. Hell, Raylan had threatened to shoot Boyd not two minutes before.

 _Where exactly is it that you meant? You said you want to leave this place. I was wondering where exactly it was you had in mind._ Boyd thinks of Raylan standing in a kitchen in Miami, the smell of cookies fresh out of the oven, Raylan snapping pictures of his daughter’s bright, sun-drenched grin. He thinks of the brush of Raylan’s fingers at sixteen, the fingers curled around Raylan’s gun. Boyd turns his head, closes his eyes for a moment, and walks away.

_Does it change you? I guess we’ll see._


End file.
